


homecoming

by spookykingdomstarlight



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, Post-Star Trek Beyond, ToT: Chocolate Box, Trick or Treat 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-19 09:46:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8200571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/pseuds/spookykingdomstarlight
Summary: She’s not intimidated by this place or by him. She’s not.She, too, knows a rite of passage when she sees one. After having spent three years in a school on Earth, where competition and camaraderie seems to be a way of life, she’d be a fool not to see this for what it is.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ninj](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ninj/gifts).



Even before Jaylah graduated from the Academy, she’d heard stories of Doctor McCoy. And, to be frank, about the rest of the _Enterprise_ crew, too, tales she would find unbelievable if she hadn’t experienced one of those tales herself—but right now, a welt throbbing across the back of her hand, it’s his reputation she’s most concerned with.

She’s been on board for all of a _day_ and already she’s gotten herself into trouble. Enough of it that Scotty had merely whistled and shaken his head and raised his grease-smudged hands as she’d cursed up a whirlwind. “Cannae take ye to medbay myself, lass,” he’d said. “Some things you just gotta do on yer own.”

It’s not a bad injury. He has no reason to accompany her—and really, she doesn’t want him to—but there’s a not small part of her that doesn’t want to face the doctor alone. Not over something as trivial as a fumbled plasma torch. Still. There were rules, she’s been given to understand, and an injury is an injury. “Coward,” she’d hissed, her pulse blazing painfully up her arm with each beat of her heart, because she had not been able to help needling him.

“Aye,” Scotty had said, nodding along, perfectly agreeable. Like he’d thought Jaylah doesn’t know him at all. She may have spent the last three years at the Academy, but they’d kept in touch, she and Scotty, and she knows him well enough to know that he’d been hiding something behind that veneer of affability. “Tha’s very true. Off you go now.”

Then he’d yelled, “Just think of it this way: some people say an injury on yer first day is a good omen. Get all that bad luck out of the way, yeah?” after her, just to rub it in. He’s a good man, Montgomery Scotty is, but a mean friend. And if she’d smiled as she’d turned away, because she happens to like the way they can tease one another, that had been and remains her business.

And now here she stands, right out front of Doctor McCoy’s infamous medbay, alone, all those stories swirling in the back of her mind. _Did you know he…_ and _this one time_ … and _I swear, I thought he was gonna…_ all racing through her mind.

She’s not intimidated by this place or by him. She’s _not_.

She, too, knows a rite of passage when she sees one. Spending so long in a school on Earth, where competition and camaraderie seems to be a way of life, she’d be a fool not to see this for what it is. Perhaps that’s why Scotty had behaved the way he had.

But she’d thought… well, she’d thought it would take her _longer_ to make the mistake that brings her here today. Her hands are steady and her reflexes are good and she’d graduated at the top of her class just for this chance. She hadn’t done all that, learned everything she could, proved herself the best, for a pointless burn and a trip to the medbay during her very first shift.

“You are being foolish,” she tells herself, tugging at the hem of her shirt, the red of it only slightly redder than her wound. Determination fills her, the kind you pull together out of nothing and that might easily collapse against any pushback, and strides those last few feet toward the entrance. “You can do this.”

The door slides open, preternaturally eager to grant her access, she thinks, whisper quiet, only to immediately be followed by a, “Dammit, Jim,” and the sound of huffing as boots clap across the floor. “You’re not—”

Then the noise stops and she lifts her head just enough to see Doctor McCoy peering at her from across the room, Captain Kirk leaning against a nearby biobed, his legs crossed at the ankle, his hands tucked against his elbows. A strained look flickers across his face, but before Jaylah can say anything, it transforms into an easy smile. “Ensign,” he says, the seriousness of his voice at odds with the pleasure she sees in his gaze. “Everything all right?”

“That’s my question to ask, Jim,” McCoy says, returning his attention to whatever he’d been in the process of doing before Jaylah had arrived. He finishes crossing the room and, fingers flying, keys open a cabinet behind which Jaylah sees a neat array of hyposprays. Plucking one of the hypos from inside, he turns. “Last I checked, I’m the one qualified to hear the answer.” He turns his attention to Jaylah. “You’re not in any immediate danger, are you?” he asks, staring her down.

She shakes her head.

McCoy nods with a clipped jerk of his head. “Good. Hold on just a tic if you don’t mind.”

Returning to the Kirk’s side, he flips the hypo over—Jaylah hadn’t even noticed it was the wrong way around—and reaches for Kirk’s throat, his thumb pressing against his jaw to tilt his head just so. Then, lightning fast, he jabs the hypo against Kirk’s skin while Kirk winces and hisses. “That’s a reminder that you’re not twenty-five anymore,” he says, wagging the hypo in Kirk’s face.

“Yes, Captain,” Kirk replies, to which McCoy reluctantly smiles, maybe pleased. Pleased enough for his lip to quirk minutely, just for a second. The warmth of that smile calms something in Jaylah’s chest, a worry, maybe, that Doctor McCoy really is as unapproachable as everyone had said he is.

Then again, she’d only ever heard it from people on campus, people who hadn’t served with him. Maybe it’s different here. Maybe he’s different.

“Yeah, uh huh. ‘Captain,’ my… ah—well. Try that someplace else, huh?” He gestures at the door. “And maybe stop cluttering up my medbay while you’re at it.”

“You’re the only one in here right now, Bones,” Kirk says, shrugging, yet backing toward the door all the same. “There’s plenty of room.”

McCoy’s arms cross and his eyebrow arches as he waits, pointed, for Kirk to comply. And almost to Jaylah’s surprise—though still less surprising than it probably should be—he does, lifting his hands. “All right. I can see when I’m not wanted.” He winks at Jaylah, which only makes her want to roll her eyes at him in return.

 _You cannot do that now_ , she reminds herself. _This isn’t Altamid. You are a Starfleet officer_.

“Stop by when your shift’s over, Ensign,” Kirk says, stopping just inside the doorway, not quite close enough for it to slide open for him. He is warm, perhaps warmer even than Jaylah remembers him being. Kirk cares in a way that squeezes the heart beneath Jaylah’s ribcage. Then again, so does Scotty. So do a lot of people, even the ones she might not have expected. “I’d like to hear about how your first day went.”

“Not well obviously,” she manages, keeping her voice free of most of her frustration, “Captain.”

“Don’t worry about it, Jaylah,” McCoy says, now gesturing at the biobed next to the one Kirk had been sitting on. “You lasted about two hours longer than Jim did on his first day aboard. That counts for something in my book.”

“That does not—” But then she narrows her eyes, turning a sharp gaze on McCoy, only shifting her attention to the door when he narrows his own in its direction. The door is now absent of the captain. Suspiciously so. _Conspicuously so_.

McCoy’s eyebrow quirks, his face suggesting an utter lack of surprise, as he waits for her to take her place on the bed. “Yeah?” he asks, eyes honing in on her hand.

“Never mind,” she says, stalking toward the bed, fighting the urge to hide her injury from him. Which is ridiculous, she knows. Why else is she here except to have him look at it? Pushing herself up onto the bed, she watches him as he approaches, just a little bit wary, and not a little embarrassed still.

He takes hold of her hand, tsking as he peers at it. “Don’t need a tricorder to diagnose this,” he says. “Scotty brings me one of these at least once a week. Might just run me out of burn ointment one of these days all on his own.” Something of Jaylah’s surprise must show on her face, because he smirks, his eyes crinkling, almost gleeful. “Don’t worry. You’ll figure out soon enough that he’s at least as bad as the rest of you engineers at messing with the wrong end of a tool. He just likes to pretend otherwise while he can still pull the wool over your eyes.”

He steps away again and returns with a tube of—something. And a thin, transparent rectangle of—something else.

“What is this?” she asks, holding her hand out.

“Glorified bandage,” he replies. “Encourages cell regeneration and’ll cut down on the pain you’ve gotta be feeling.” He speaks by rote, the words well-memorized and said with a hint of deprecation. But as he smooths the pale blue gel over the back of her hand, his touch is gentle, his fingers barely pressing against her skin as he seals the rectangle over the gel and her burn both. The effect is immediate, cooling, and she finds herself thankful despite the churning of her stomach, the anger she has directed toward herself.

“Congratulations, Ensign. You’re truly a member of this crew now,” McCoy finishes, clapping Jaylah briefly on the shoulder. “I hope you don’t take offense when I say I hope I don’t have to see you down here too often.”

She hops down from the bed, mood improving as the salve he’d applied soothes the pain of the burn. _He is not so bad,_ she thinks. Not that she’d really thought otherwise. “Thank you, Doctor.”

Nodding absently, he turns away. “Wait up a second,” he says over his shoulder as he walks back toward that cabinet he’d opened earlier. He returns with a hypo, Jaylah fighting the urge to flinch away at seeing it and remembering the way he’d handled it with the captain. A smile flickers across his face, but he merely holds it out and drops it into her open palm once she reaches for it. “You might need this tomorrow.”

“What is it?”

“Painkiller,” he says, “mostly.” Smiling, just that little bit amused, he adds, “Have a good rest of shift, Ensign, and don’t get into too much trouble tonight, huh?”

“I never get into trouble,” she says, heading toward the door. Then, furrowing her brows, “What is tonight?”

“What’s tonight, she says. Hey, Jaylah? You’re gonna be just fine here. Barring any more run-ins with a plasma torch anyway,” he says instead of answering. Jaylah wonders whether it’s purposeful or not, this minor misdirection, and what sort of trouble she should prepare herself for regardless. But while she ponders that, he continues speaking, perhaps unaware of how perplexed she is. “We’re lucky to have you here full time.”

That statement, at least, is not perplexing in the slightest. Too bad it’s something worse all together. She still has not accustomed herself to kind words and colleagues and a life that is hers to build. That anyone would consider it luck that she is around&hellip? A lump lodges itself in her throat, but she doesn’t let that stop her from answering. “Thank you, Doctor. It is good to be back.”

Even if it had taken her three years to do so.

And if she notices the smug, knowing smile on Scotty’s face when she returns to her post, well, she’s got enough good will in her to ignore it.

“You ready to get into some trouble?” he says, all but bouncing on his toes.

“Oh, aye, Montgomery Scotty,” she replies, imitating his words, if not his accent. “I am more than ready for this trouble.”


End file.
